It’s been a while since I’ve posted a game idea. So it was about time to come up with something new. Here comes…

Game Idea #43

The Hand

The Hand is an experimental game that aims to raise questions about choice and authorship in video games.

The player finds herself as an avatar in an open world setting with a third person POV. She can choose items from her inventory to wear or to carry in her hands, she can pick up objects from her environment, she can walk around and explore buildings and space, she can approach NPCs and talk to them etc etc.

However, soon it will be understood that there is another “Will” present in the game: A huge hand, intervening by entering the screen from above if it doesn’t like the decisions the player makes.

The hand would push the avatar around in order to tell her to move on or to make her move into a certain direction, it would “adjust” the avatar to the track it envisioned the player to take, it would deny certain directions completely by blocking the way or it would grab the avatar and place it onto a certain spot in the game world.

But that’s not all: the hand would take away certain items from the avatar’s hand and put them back into the inventory, it would place other items into her hand, it would put back items that the avatar picked up from the environment and shoo the avatar if she continues to pick the same item again. It would get angry if we talk to NPC’s that it doesn’t like and shut our mouth so that the NPC can’t understand what we are saying.

Finally, if the player insists on doing what the hand doesn’t want her to do, she would simply “grab the controller” and move along the avatar by herself for a while. During the period in which the player is stripped from control, she could however “promise” not to do it again and with a bit of begging get back controls. If she fails to keep her promise though, the Hand would keep the controller for longer periods the next time or simply decide that it doesn’t want to play with us any longer.

You will remember that I failed from my self-imposed challenge of coming up with 52 Game Ideas within a year. However, my decision was to keep going and add new ideas to the list as they come. After a quite long break, here is finally a new game idea. Enjoy!

Game Idea #42

We Built This City (WBTC)

WBTC is a city and road construction set that can be used to create a simulated city environment that can host a variety of games simultaneously.

Sample Mission Brief for a class of up to 30 students:

Form groups of up to six players. Use the WBTC set and any material of your choice to build a city around a certain theme (China, ghosts, lunar city, mafia, film festival etc…). Connect the cities to each other when their design is finished to have a group of city districts, however limit players access to the districts of their friends. Play a racing or exploration game with a reputation system in which for each new level of reputation a player’s freedom of travelling expands into a new city district. The player who finishes the quests in all city districts wins the game.

In Parachutes, your goal is to perform one of the roles in an combined effort to form a figure with a group of fellow parachuters during your free fall. Your goal is to get into position, connect, and disband without causing a disaster (like failing to come into position and connect, disband orderly, and open the parachute in time and safely.

After each new figure, a new, more complicated one will be unlocked, with more fellows, lower altitude (lesser time), windy conditions and difficult locations like rock walls etc.

This week’s game idea is inspired by the brazilian directorGlauber Rocha (I mentioned it first at a thread at the IGDA Forums though). It’s a game about poor kids living in the streets, who are exposed to weather, hunger and violence. Could be a Sims mod actually. Here comes…

Game Idea #39

Hunger

In Hunger, you are in charge of a group of kids who live on the streets. Everyday objects like dustbins or ATM booths have a new meaning to you, since these mean food or shelter. Part of the game is to discover the “hidden” functionalities of all type of everyday objects. The game also supports the establishment of relations with street animals like dogs or cats.

Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha

A primary concern will be to avoid sickness and health problems since these are very difficult to overcome.

Another primary goal is to avoid or prevent violence. For example violence between the members of the group which you control. The violence that occurs ranges from humiliation to forced labor to mutilation. You also need to manage other encounters with potential sources of violence such as parents, mafia, and police or ‘good citizens’ that want ‘this problem’ to be removed from their backyards ‘immediately’.

An in-game reference to games will be the following instance: Since our characters are kids, they love to spend the little bit of money they have on those 8 or 16-bit era games in that rotten arcade around the corner. But their hopes to play one of those games lasts only until the owner of the arcade refuses to sell them coins because he believes that they ‘disturb the peace’ of the kids from the ‘good’ families.

You lose the game when all of the kids under your control are dead or under arrest. In other words, you continue to play only as long as you have at least one free living character.

This weeks game idea has been inspired by a blog entry at22 Over 7 about the Ouroboros. The Ouroboros is a symbol used since the ancient ages and is known as serpent that eats its own tail. The symbol is also used in astrology and said to represent the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way from the galactic central point near Sagittaurus, it looks like a serpent which eats its own tail. The name of the game idea I come up with belongs to an astrolabe built during the reign of King Sejong of Korea. This device called Honcheonui (but often abbreviated as Honui) was used to measure the positions of astronomical objects such as sun, moon and planets. It consists of several orbital rings placed into one another. Anyway, here comes…

Game Idea #38

Honui

In Honui, your goal is to make your opponents serpents eat their tails before your serpent has eaten its own tail. The game ends when a players serpent has completely eaten itself. The player whose serpent is the longest will win the game.

Each players start with a shared time concept, however in the process of the game, players will be able to put each other into different concepts of time. As a result, the same events will have different outcomes in regard to the serpents. For some serpents time will flow faster, for others slower, and this will have an impact on how quick the serpents eat their tails. It will also be able to reverse time and recover some of the parts that the serpents had eaten.

Hunoi will be a fun strategy game in which time and timing are the central tactical elements. The master of time will be the master of the universe.

This week’s idea is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. Here comes…

Game Idea #37

Angelus Novus

Backstory

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

The Game

In this board game for an unlimited number of players your group goal is to help the ‘Angel of History’ to survive Progress with as little loss as possible. While Progress (which is embodied by a number of specific game mechanics) will come up with new thoughts and concepts that it will articulate in order to trigger fatal events such as Hiroshima or Auschwitz, your goal as players will be to combine alternative thoughts and concepts in order to cancel out or avoid the fatal events to happen and create a ‘clean’ streak in history.

This week I’m going to present to you a word game which was inspired by French linguist Emile Benveniste’s theory of layers of signification. Enjoy!

Game Idea #35

Emil

Emil is a word game for 3-5 players. The game starts with as many closed letter-cards in the center as there are players. The rest of the letter-cards is equally distributed among the players. During game turns, the players will first unveil the closed letter-cards, generate as many words and sentences as possible from the letters available in the center, and then add one card from the cards they possess. The players will prefer to add a letter that makes it difficult for the player who follows to create new words. When all players have added one new card, each one will remove one of the cards in the center. The player who scored the most points when all letter-cards have been played and removed, wins the game.

A player can alter the state of the game dramatically by carrying the generation of meaning from the word level to the sentence level. Once a player manages to create a sentence with the letters in the center, she doubles the score for each word in that sentence. If the following players cannot generate sentences and generate words, then they will only receive half the points they would normally receive for words. Therefore it’s critical to be able to build sentences.